A quick overview of the recent MSDN and TechNet improvements

Over the past few months, Microsoft has significantly improved both its MSDN …

Back in February, Microsoft rolled out version 3.0 of its forums on both MSDN and TechNet. The new version completely overhauled navigation and interaction with the discussion boards, adding new features and improving old ones. Real-time updates, tagging, filtering, RSS additions, and many back-end performance tweaks were just some features included in the update. Little did MSDN and TechNet users know, but Microsoft was only warming up. The company had decided that 2008 was the year to improve the experience for its IT professionals and developers.

Also in February, Microsoft started figuring out how it was going to move msdn.microsoft.com (3 million hits a day) and technet.microsoft.com (1 million hits a day) to virtual machines. The migration to Hyper-V RC0 was completed on March 31, 2008 for MSDN, and on April 18, 2008 for TechNet. It is not clear if Microsoft will bother moving its two most popular subdomains to the recently released Hyper-V RC1 (now also available on Windows Update as the optional KB950049) or whether the company will wait until it releases the final version.

The setup for the virtual machines is 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM, powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs, 32GB RAM, and 4x146GB hard disk drives. Naturally, Microsoft has indicated that the move resulted in noticeable performance improvements (see the report linked below). It's great to see Microsoft leading the way when it comes to deploying new technologies—even if they are Microsoft's own—and documenting everything along the way so that others can find the transition easier.

As already mentioned in the last Friday links post, on May 22, 2008, Microsoft brought new content and redesigns to both the MSDN and TechNet webpages, 18 Tech and Dev centers, in seven different languages. "One feature that you will find useful is that on our Developer and Technology Centers, you’ll increasingly see content from Microsoft experts as well as the community highlighted right on the home page of each Center," said S. Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I've definitely noticed the differences, and haven't really found anything to complain about.